excited gentleman of middle age who wore a coat and hat trimmed with
fur, and seemed, moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur
himself on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up to
Caroline.
"Found you at last," he cried. "Been looking for you all over town.
Tried your house on the 'phone and your secretary told me he thought
you'd gone to a bookshop called the Moonlight--"
Caroline turned to him irritably.
"Do I employ you for your reminiscences?" she snapped. "Are you my
tutor or my broker?"
"Your broker," confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken somewhat aback. "I
beg your pardon. I came about that phonograph stock. I can sell for a
hundred and five."
"Then do it"
"Very well. I thought I'd better--"
"Go sell it. I'm talking to my grandson."
"Very well. I--"
"Good-by."
"Good-by, Madame." The fur-trimmed man made a slight bow and hurried
in some confusion from the shop.
"As for you," said Caroline, turning to her grandson, "you stay just
where you are and be quiet."
She turned to Merlin and included his entire length in a not
unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he found himself smiling too.
In an instant they had both broken into a cracked but none the less
spontaneous chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the other
side of the store. There they stopped, faced each other, and gave vent
to another long fit of senile glee.
"It's the only way," she gasped in a sort of triumphant malignity.
"The only thing that keeps old folks like me happy is the sense that
they can make other people step around. To be old and rich and have
poor descendants is almost as much fun as to be young and beautiful
and have ugly sisters."
"Oh, yes," chuckled Merlin. "I know. I envy you."
She nodded, blinking.
"The last time I was in here, forty years ago," she said, "you were a
young man very anxious to kick up your heels."
"I was," he confessed.
"My visit must have meant a good deal to you."
"You have all along," he exclaimed. "I thought--I used to think at
first that you were a real person--human, I mean."
She laughed.
"Many men have thought me inhuman."
"But now," continued Merlin excitedly, "I understand. Understanding is
allowed to us old people--after nothing much matters. I see now that
on a certain night when you danced upon a table-top you were nothing
but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and perverse woman."
Her old eyes were far away, her voice no more than the echo of a
forgotten dream.
"How I danced that night! I remember."
"You were making an attempt at me. Olive's arms were closing about me
and you warned me to be free and keep my measure of youth and
irresponsibility. But it seemed like an effect gotten up at the last
moment. It came too late."
"You are very old," she said inscrutably. "I did not realize."
"Also I have not forgotten what you did to me when I was thirty-five.
You shook me with that traffic tie-up. It was a magnificent effort.
The beauty and power you radiated! You became personified even to my
wife, and she feared you. For weeks I wanted to slip out of the house
at dark and forget the stuffiness of life with music and cocktails and
a girl to make me young. But then--I no longer knew how."
"And now you are so very old."
With a sort of awe she moved back and away from him.
"Yes, leave me!" he cried. "You are old also; the spirit withers with
the skin. Have you come here only to tell me something I had best
forget: that to be old and poor is perhaps more wretched than to be
old and rich; to remind me that _my_ son hurls my gray failure in
my face?"
"Give me my book," she commanded harshly. "Be quick, old man!"
Merlin looked at her once more and then patiently obeyed. He picked up
the book and handed it to her, shaking his head when she offered him a
bill.
"Why go through the farce of paying me? Once you made me wreck these
very premises."
"I did," she said in anger, "and I'm glad. Perhaps there had been
enough done to ruin _me_."
She gave him a glance, half disdain, half ill-concealed uneasiness,
and with a brisk word to her urban grandson moved toward the door.
Then she was gone--out of his shop--out of his life. The door clicked.
With a sigh he turned and walked brokenly back toward the glass
partition that enclosed the yellowed accounts of many years as well as
the mellowed, wrinkled Miss McCracken.
Merlin regarded her parched, cobwebbed face with an odd sort of pity.
She, at any rate, had had less from life than he. No rebellious,
romantic spirit popping out unbidden had, in its memorable moments,
given her life a zest and a glory.
Then Miss McGracken looked up and spoke to him:
"Still a spunky old piece, isn't she?"
Merlin started.
"Who?"
"Old Alicia Dare. Mrs. Thomas Allerdyce she is now, of course; has
been, these thirty years."
"What? I don't understand you." Merlin sat down suddenly in his swivel
chair; his eyes were wide.
"Why, surely, Mr. Grainger, you can't tell me that you've forgotten
her, when for ten years she was the most notorious character in New
York. Why, one time when she was the correspondent in the Throckmorton
divorce case she attracted so much attention on Fifth Avenue that
there was a traffic tie-up. Didn't you read about it in the papers."
"I never used to read the papers." His ancient brain was whirring.
"Well, you can't have forgotten the time she came in here and ruined
the business. Let me tell you I came near asking Mr. Moonlight Quill
for my salary, and clearing out."
"Do you mean, that--that you _saw_ her?"
"Saw. her! How could I help, it with the racket that went on. Heaven
knows Mr. Moonlight Quill didn't like it either but of course _he_
didn't say anything. He was daffy about her and she could twist him
around her little finger. The second he opposed one of her whims she'd
threaten to tell his wife on him. Served him right. The idea of that
man falling for a pretty adventuress! Of course he was never rich
enough for _her_ even though the shop paid well in those days."
"But when I saw her." stammered Merlin, "that is, when I
_thought_ saw her, she lived with her mother."
"Mother, trash!". said Miss McCracken indignantly. "She had a woman
there she called 'Aunty', who was no more related to her than I am.
Oh, she was a bad one--but clever. Right after the Throckmorton
divorce case she married Thomas Allerdyce, and made herself secure for
life."
"Who was she?" cried Merlin. "For God's sake what was she--a witch?"
"Why, she was Alicia Dare, the dancer, of course. In those days you
couldn't pick up a paper without finding her picture."
Merlin sat very quiet, his brain suddenly fatigued and stilled. He was
an old man now indeed, so old that it was impossible for him to dream
of ever having been young, so old that the glamour was gone out of the
world, passing not into the faces of children and into the persistent
comforts of warmth and life, but passing out of the range of sight and
feeling. He was never to smile again or to sit in a long reverie when
spring evenings wafted the cries of children in at his window until
gradually they became the friends of his boyhood out there, urging him
to come and play before the last dark came down. He was too old now
even for memories.
That night he sat at supper with his wife and son, who had used him
for their blind purposes. Olive said:
"Don't sit there like a death's-head. Say something."
"Let him sit quiet," growled Arthur. "If you encourage him he'll tell
us a story we've heard a hundred times before."
Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock. When he was in his
room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his
thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool.
"O Russet Witch!"
But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many
temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet
only those who, like him, had wasted earth.
UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES
THE LEES OF HAPPINESS
If you should look through the files of old magazines for the first
years of the present century you would find, sandwiched in between the
stories of Richard Harding Davis and Frank Norris and others long
since dead, the work of one Jeffrey Curtain: a novel or two, and
perhaps three or four dozen short stories. You could, if you were
interested, follow them along until, say, 1908, when they suddenly
disappeared.
When you had read them all you would have been quite sure that here
were no masterpieces--here were passably amusing stories, a bit out of
date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a
dreary half hour in a dental office. The man who did them was of good
intelligence, talented, glib, probably young. In the samples of his
work you found there would have been nothing to stir you to more than
a faint interest in the whims of life--no deep interior laughs, no
sense of futility or hint of tragedy.
After reading them you would yawn and put the number back in the
files, and perhaps, if you were in some library reading-room, you
would decide that by way of variety you would look at a newspaper of
the period and see whether the Japs had taken Port Arthur. But if by
any chance the newspaper you had chosen was the right one and had
crackled open at the theatrical page, your eyes would have been
arrested and held, and for at least a minute you would have forgotten
Port Arthur as quickly as you forgot Chвteau Thierry. For you would,
by this fortunate chance, be looking at the portrait of an exquisite
woman.
Those were tie days of "Florodora" and of sextets, of pinched-in
waists and blown-out sleeves, of almost bustles and absolute ballet
skirts, but here, without doubt, disguised as she might be by the
unaccustomed stiffness and old fashion of her costume, was a butterfly
of butterflies. Here was the gayety of the period--the soft wine of
eyes, the songs that flurried hearts, the toasts and tie bouquets, the
dances and the dinners. Here was a Venus of the hansom, cab, the
Gibson girl in her glorious prime. Here was...
...here was you. Find by looking at the name beneath, one Roxanne
Milbank, who had been chorus girl and understudy in "The Daisy Chain,"
but who, by reason of an excellent performance when the star was
indisposed, had gained a leading part.
You would look again--and wonder. Why you had never heard of her. Why
did her name not linger in popular songs and vaudeville jokes and
cigar bands, and the memory of that gay old uncle of yours along with
Lillian Russell and Stella Mayhew and Anna Held? Roxanne
Milbank-whither had she gone? What dark trap-door had opened suddenly
and swallowed her up? Her name was certainly not in last Sunday's
supplement on the list of actresses married to English noblemen. No
doubt she was dead--poor beautiful young lady--and quite forgotten.
I am hoping too much. I am having you stumble on Jeffrey Curtains's
stories and Roxanne Milbank's picture. It would be incredible that you
should find a newspaper item six months later, a single item two
inches by four, which informed the public of the marriage, very
quietly, of Miss Roxanne Milbank, who had been on tour with "The Daisy
Chain," to Mr. Jeffrey Curtain, the popular author. "Mrs. Curtain," it
added dispassionately, "will retire from the stage."
It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming;
she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs
they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together. Yet had
Jeffrey Curtain kept at scrivening for twoscore years he could not
have put a quirk into one of his stories weirder than the quirk that
came into his own life. Had Roxanne Milbank played three dozen parts
and filled five thousand houses she could never have had a role with
more happiness and more despair than were in the fate prepared for
Roxanne Curtain.
For a year they lived in hotels, travelled to California, to Alaska,
to Florida, to Mexico, loved and quarrelled gently, and gloried in the
golden triflings of his wit with her beauty--they were young and
gravely passionate; they demanded everything and then yielded
everything again in ecstasies of unselfishness and pride. She loved
the swift tones of his voice and his frantic, if unfounded jealousy.
He loved her dark radiance, the white irises of her eyes, the warm,
lustrous enthusiasm of her smile.
"Don't you like her?" he would demand rather excitedly and shyly.
"Isn't she wonderful? Did you ever see--"
"Yes," they would answer, grinning. "She's a wonder. You're lucky."
The year passed. They tired of hotels. They bought an old house and
twenty acres near the town of Marlowe, half an hour from Chicago;
bought a little car, and moved out riotously with a pioneering
hallucination that would have confounded Balboa.
"Your room will be here!" they cried in turn.
--And then:
"And my room here!"
"And the nursery here when we have children."
"And we'll build a sleeping porch--oh, next year."
They moved out in April. In July Jeffrey's closest friend, Harry
Cromwell same to spend a week--they met him at the end of the long
lawn and hurried him proudly to the house.
Harry was married also. His wife had had a baby some six months before
and was still recuperating at her mother's in New York. Roxanne had
gathered from Jeffrey that Harry's wife was not as attractive as
Harry--Jeffrey had met her once and considered her--"shallow." But
Harry had been married nearly two years and was apparantly happy, so
Jeffrey guessed that she was probably all right.
"I'm making biscuits," chattered Roxanne gravely. "Can you wife make
biscuits? The cook is showing me how. I think every woman should know
how to make biscuits. It sounds so utterly disarming. A woman who can
make biscuits can surely do no----"
"You'll have to come out here and live," said Jeffrey. "Get a place
out in the country like us, for you and Kitty."
"You don't know Kitty. She hates the country. She's got to have her
theatres and vaudevilles."
"Bring her out," repeated Jeffrey. "We'll have a colony. There's an
awfully nice crowd here already. Bring her out!"
They were at the porch steps now and Roxanne made a brisk gesture
toward a dilapidated structure on the right.
"The garage," she announced. "It will also be Jeffrey's writing-room
within the month. Meanwhile dinner is at seven. Meanwhile to that I
will mix a cocktail."
The two men ascended to the second floor--that is, they ascended
half-way, for at the first landing Jeffrey dropped his guest's
suitcase and in a cross between a query and a cry exclaimed:
"For God's sake, Harry, how do you like her?"
"We will go up-stairs," answered his guest, "and we will shut the
door."
Half an hour later as they were sitting together in the library
Roxanne reissued from the kitchen, bearing before her a pan of
biscuits. Jeffrey and Harry rose.
"They're beautiful, dear," said the husband, intensely.
"Exquisite," murmured Harry.
Roxanne beamed.
"Taste one. I couldn't bear to touch them before you'd seen them all
and I can't bear to take them back until I find what they taste like."
"Like manna, darling."
Simultaneously the two men raised the biscuits to their lips, nibbled
tentatively. Simultaneously they tried to change the subject. But
Roxanne undeceived, set down the pan and seized a biscuit. After a
second her comment rang out with lugubrious finality:
"Absolutely bum!"
"Really----"
"Why, I didn't notice----"
Roxanne roared.
"Oh, I'm useless," she cried laughing. "Turn me out, Jeffrey--I'm a
parasite; I'm no goal----"
Jeffrey put his arm around her.
"Darling, I'll eat your biscuits."
"They're beautiful, anyway," insisted Roxanne.
"They're-they're decorative," suggested Harry.
Jeffrey took him up wildly.
"That's the word. They're decorative; they're masterpieces. We'll use
them."
He rushed to the kitchen and returned with a hammer and a handful of
nails.
"We'll use them, by golly, Roxanne! We'll make a frieze out of them."
"Don't!" wailed Roxanne. "Our beautiful house."
"Never mind. We're going to have the library repapered in October.
Don't you remember?"
"Well----"
Bang! The first biscuit was impaled to the wall, where it quivered for
a moment like a live thing.
Bang!...
When Roxanne returned, with a second round of cocktails the biscuits
were in a perpendicular row, twelve of them, like a collection of
primitive spear-heads.
"Roxanne," exclaimed Jeffrey, "you're an artist! Cook?--nonsense! You
shall illustrate my books!"
During dinner the twilight faltered into dusk, and later it was a
starry dark outside, filled and permeated with the frail gorgeousness
of Roxanne's white dress and her tremulous, low laugh.
--Such a little girl she is, thought Harry. Not as old as Kitty.
He compared the two. Kitty--nervous without being sensitive,
temperamental without temperament, a woman who seemed to flit and
never light--and Roxanne, who was as young as spring night, and summed
up in her own adolescent laughter.
--A good match for Jeffrey, he thought again. Two very young people,
the sort who'll stay very young until they suddenly find themselves
old.
Harry thought these things between his constant thoughts about Kitty,
He was depressed about Kitty. It seemed to him that she was well
enough to come back to Chicago and bring his little son. He was
thinking vaguely of Kitty when he said good-night to his friend's wife
and his friend at the foot of the stairs.
"You're our first real house guest," called Roxanne after him. "Aren't
you thrilled and proud?"
When he was out of sight around the stair corner she turned to
Jeffrey, who was standing beside her resting his hand on the end of
the banister.
"Are you tired, my dearest?"
Jeffrey rubbed the centre of his forehead with his fingers.
"A little. How did you know?"
"Oh, how could I help knowing about you?"
"It's a headache," he said moodily. "Splitting. I'll take some
aspirin."
She reached over and snapped out the light, and with his arm tight
about her waist they walked up the stairs together.
II
Harry's week passed. They drove about the dreaming lanes or idled in
cheerful inanity upon lake or lawn. In the evening Roxanne, sitting
inside, played to them while the ashes whitened on the glowing ends of
their cigars. Then came a telegram from Kitty saying that she wanted
Harry to come East and get her, so Roxanne and Jeffrey were left alone
in that privacy of which they never seemed to tire.
"Alone" thrilled them again. They wandered about the house, each
feeling intimately the presence of the other; they sat on the same
side of the table like honeymooners; they were intensely absorbed,
intensely happy.
The town of Marlowe, though a comparatively old settlement, had only
recently acquired a "society." Five or six years before, alarmed at
the smoky swelling of Chicago, two or three young married couples,
"bungalow people," had moved out; their friends had followed. The
Jeffrey Curtains found an already formed "set" prepared to welcome:
them; a country club, ballroom, and golf links yawned for them, and
there were bridge parties, and poker parties, and parties where they
drank beer, and parties where they drank nothing at all.
It was at a poker party that they found themselves a week after
Harry's departure. There were two tables, and a good proportion of the
young wives were smoking and shouting their bets, and being very
daringly mannish for those days.
Roxanne had left the game early and taken to perambulation; she
wandered into the pantry and found herself some grape juice--beer gave
her a headache--and then passed from table to table, looking over
shoulders at the hands, keeping an eye on Jeffrey and being pleasantly
unexcited and content. Jeffrey, with intense concentration, was
raising a pile of chips of all colors, and Roxanne knew by the
deepened wrinkle between his eyes that he was interested. She liked to
see him interested in small things.
She crossed over quietly and sat down on the arm of his chair.
She sat there five minutes, listening to the sharp intermittent
comments of the men and the chatter of the women, which rose from the
table like soft smoke--and yet scarcely hearing either. Then quite
innocently she reached out her hand, intending to place it on
Jeffrey's shoulder--as it touched him he started of a sudden, gave a
short grunt, and, sweeping back his arm furiously, caught her a
glancing blow on her elbow.
There was a general gasp. Roxanne regained her balance, gave a little
cry, and rose quickly to her feet. It had been the greatest shock of
her life. This, from Jeffrey, the heart of kindness, of
consideration--this instinctively brutal gesture.
The gasp became a silence. A dozen eyes were turned on Jeffrey, who
looked up as though seeing Roxanne for the first time. An expression
of bewilderment settled on his face.
"Why--Roxanne----" he said haltingly.
Into a dozen minds entered a quick suspicion, a rumor of scandal.
Could it be that behind the scenes with this couple, apparently so in
love, lurked some curious antipathy? Why else this streak of fire,
across such a cloudless heaven?
"Jeffrey!"--Roxanne's voice was pleading--startled and horrified, she
yet knew that it was a mistake. Not once did it occur to her to blame
him or to resent it. Her word was a trembling supplication--"Tell me,
Jeffrey," it said, "tell Roxanne, your own Roxanne."
"Why, Roxanne--" began Jeffrey again. The bewildered look changed to
pain. He was clearly as startled as she. "I didn't intend that," he
went on; "you startled me. You--I felt as if some one were attacking
me. I--how--why, how idiotic!"
"Jeffrey!" Again the word was a prayer, incense offered up to a high
God through this new and unfathomable darkness.
They were both on their feet, they were saying good-by, faltering,
apologizing, explaining. There was no attempt to pass it off easily.
That way lay sacrilege. Jeffrey had not been feeling well, they said.
He had become nervous. Back of both their minds was the unexplained
horror of that blow--the marvel that there had been for an instant
something between them--his anger and her fear--and now to both a
sorrow, momentary, no doubt, but to be bridged at once, at once, while
there was yet time. Was that swift water lashing under their feet--the
fierce glint of some uncharted chasm?
Out in their car under the harvest moon he talked brokenly. It was
just--incomprehensible to him, he said. He had been thinking of the
poker game--absorbed--and the touch on his shoulder had seemed like an
attack. An attack! He clung to that word, flung it up as a shield. He
had hated what touched him. With the impact of his hand it had gone,
that--nervousness. That was all he knew.
Both their eyes filled with tears and they whispered love there under
the broad night as the serene streets of Marlowe sped by. Later, when
they went to bed, they were quite calm. Jeffrey was to take a week off
all work--was simply to loll, and sleep, and go on long walks until
this nervousness left him. When they had decided this safety settled
down upon Roxanne. The pillows underhead became soft and friendly; the
bed on which they lay seemed wide, and white, and sturdy beneath the
radiance that streamed in at the window.
Five days later, in the first cool of late afternoon, Jeffrey picked
up an oak chair and sent it crashing through his own front window.
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